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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25939210">Ex Libris</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Proseia/pseuds/Proseia'>Proseia</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Stardew Valley (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Adventure &amp; Romance, Eventual Romance, Gay like me, Genderbending, M/M, Slow Burn, Trans Male Character, also Abby's gonna be a beast, but mostly I just like the source material a lot, pam's actually a pretty good mom in this one, penn and pam are basically the Winchesters and I'm all about it, penny's a boy now, sort of a novelization, transmasc penny</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 06:07:57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>7,839</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25939210</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Proseia/pseuds/Proseia</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Penn and his mother Pam are professional monster hunters, traveling the coast of the Gem Sea and beyond as part of the Ferngill Adventurer's Guild. When they're called back to Pelican Town for a guild meeting, however, both are distressed to find out they're being reassigned.</p><p>Thanks to a corporate mining operation, the monster infestation of the local cave system has swollen out of control and is in danger of spilling over into the little town. Penn and Pam will have to move in longterm, posing as a down-on-their-luck civilian family, to protect the unsuspecting townsfolk from disaster.</p><p>As a rough-edged woman of the road, Pam has trouble staying put, but Penn had plans of his own. He's been planning for months to break ties with the guild and move farther inland to pursue his study of arcane history at the university, but now finds himself on "one last job" that has no apparent end date. Add to that, he gets the sense that Marlon and Gil, the guild's local leaders, aren't telling him or his mother everything they know.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Penny/Player (Stardew Valley)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. The Shrine</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>First in my memories and then my dreams, it was a raging river that shot and branched through the farmland, like veins through a heart. It came on slow but by the time I saw it again in the flesh, I was dreaming of it every night.</p><p>In the daylight, it was a creek, barely a trickle in some places. The farm was too small to host a real river, but even by creek standards it was punier than I remembered. I stood on the little dirt road that ran up to the cottage and frowned as Mayor Lewis and the town carpenter, a hale, red-headed woman named Robin, rattled on about how much my grandfather had loved the farm. <em>Yeah, I gathered that</em>, I wanted to say. The central reason I was here was because the dreams of the farm had become so constant and vivid that I woke feeling like I hadn’t slept at all, but had lived another life overnight. The visions only got stronger with the sleeping pills, and by the time my shrink realized I wasn’t fucking around and my medical leave finally kicked in, I was ready to snap.</p><p>I hadn’t wanted a farm. If there was anything I wanted, just at that moment, it was to be back in my cozy city apartment with my girlfriend—or come to think of it, maybe just the apartment, with a cup of coffee and a book. My girlfriend had laughed when I first talked about the dreams—a tinkling, burbling laugh like that creek running through the land—and then, as if she’d expected that dose of mild condescension to fix the issue, started scowling when it didn’t. Somehow my dreams—and not even figurative dreams, like the fantasies of becoming a rock star or a TV chef or a sexy, romantic nomadic journalist but actual, literal brain-chemical-and-synapse-dreams, as inescapable as sleep itself—became a sign of my lack of commitment to her, and then a sign of some kind of weird ulterior motive. No matter how often I said I wasn’t, she was convinced I was trying to pressure her into leaving her job and family and abandoning her future to move out to the middle of nowhere. If I wasn’t, she reasoned, why did I talk about it at all? Why couldn’t I leave her out of it? </p><p>In our last fight, I’d shouted: “Why can you not understand that I don’t <em>want</em> this? I’m being—” </p><p>“What, forced?” She scoffed. “Destined?”</p><p><em>Haunted</em>. </p><p>I’d said it and meant it, and when she walked out, I didn’t try to stop her. Three days later, my leave was approved. I packed up as much of my life as I could fit into two suitcases and a backpack, left the rest on the sidewalk with a “free” sign, and got on the bus to the valley. It wasn’t until six hours into the drive that I knew I was never coming back. </p><p>I watched the mayor and Robin walk back to town, then turned to the old cottage and squinted into it through the failing light. <em>Alright Grandad</em>, I thought pointedly at the darkness inside. <em>I’ve given up everything to drag my dumb ass out here, so either I get some real fucking sleep tonight, or tomorrow I’m burning this place to the ground.</em></p><p>
  <em> <b>***</b> </em>
</p><p>I was standing on the bridge, watching the current tug the bobber on my fishing line down and away, down and away. I frowned. “How’m I gonna feel the bite when the water’s pulling this hard?”</p><p>“You’ll get the hang of it,” Grandad said. “All that time getting phantom bites will just help you recognize what a real one feels like.”</p><p>“What if there’s a bite, but I don’t know it, and then it gets away?”</p><p>“Then it gets away. There’ll always be another.”</p><p>Something bumped the line. I tugged sharply, but the red and white bobber just bounced up and then settled into the water again.</p><p>“And the next one might even be…” Grandad’s eyes glittered. “<em>The Legend.</em>”</p><p>“What if I lose him, too?”</p><p>“Nah,” he said. “He’ll turn up again. Always does. Old boy’s like a bad penny.”</p><p>
  <b>***</b>
</p><p>I woke up with my chest and right cheek pressed against the floorboards, legs splayed, one knee hiked almost up to my armpit. The air mattress had deflated under me while I slept, and now it felt like the slick, rubbery carcass of some huge sea creature, or maybe an inflatable emergency raft that had stayed buoyant just long enough to chuck me up onto a rocky, forgotten shore. </p><p>I lay still for a little longer and canvassed my brain for residual dreams, eying the stack of firewood by the door. There had been one, but it had been muzzy and mild—nothing like the toilsome, endless dreams of broken stone and dry wood and fallow earth I’d been plagued by for the last few years. </p><p>I sat up, stiff and creaky as the boards beneath me, but it was the kind of ache you can walk off. I hooked my arms over my knees and flexed, letting my spine crackle and my neck pop, and looked around the cabin for what I realized was the first time in over a decade. </p><p>The living-dining-sleeping area was a single room, with a little washroom/storeroom set off to one side. No door, but my grandfather had always lived alone. A yellowing floral-print plastic shower curtain tacked over the door frame had been more than enough privacy for his needs. There was a rickety kitchen table and one chair, and a single naked bulb swung from the ceiling. The fireplace wasn’t much more than a blackened brick cave at the middle of the back wall.</p><p>I’d barely even taken note of the room before passing out last night, and in the early morning light it looked almost cozy. Rustic, certainly, but cleaner and without the pests I’d expected. Gusts of cold spring wind rattled the windows and kicked up little swirls of dust on the sills, but the corners were clear of cobwebs, and the air was fresh. It wasn’t much, but it also wasn’t nearly as dismal and dangerous as an abandoned house could have been. Maybe the mayor and Robin had tidied after I’d called ahead to make sure the place was still standing, though by that point it wouldn’t have stopped me even if the house had been reduced to a pile of splintery rubble. I was so desperate I’d’ve pitched a tent on the bare ground if that’s what it took to get a night of actual rest.</p><p>I took a deep breath. I could feel myself resisting how much better I already felt. Still not great, but not worse, either, and I’d been trending steadily downhill for months. I couldn’t stand to be let down again, like all the times before when I’d thought I felt energy and life returning to me, but it turned out to just be a fleeting lie concocted of mania and whatever existential verve a few cups of dark roast could impart. There was no coffee pot here, though, and the mania was at a low drip, too. I was still in my clothes from yesterday, and sore all over, and perishing for a piss, but besides all that I was comfortable enough that I was having to talk myself into getting up at all. After a suitable interval, though, I availed myself of the facilities and wandered outside.</p><p>The sun was up, but only barely, as if it was dealing with a bout of mild seasonal depression too. The clouds hung low but piled high, and a stiff, cool breeze curled against me like a cat. I took a deep breath of it and set off on a dutiful survey of the farm.</p><p>The term <em>farm</em> was perhaps a misnomer, or at least misleading. For a tract of land to legally be considered a farm, there has to be some kind of organized productive activity happening somewhere on it. In its current state, and the state of the past decade, Grandad’s farm had just been land. Scrubby, open brushland, surrounded and punctuated by towering, swaying, littering pine trees and boulders and encased in hard, broken, untilled earth. </p><p>To be brutally honest, I had no particular interest in turning it back into a proper farm again. I had no training, no experience, and had even told Grandad that I wasn’t interested in becoming a farmer, but he’d gone ahead and willed it to me anyway. Ever since he died when I was seventeen, the property taxes had been paid out of an escrow he’d set up so that his gift at least wouldn’t ruin me right out the gate. I was pretty pissed with him for haunting me the way he was, but I could at least say that when he did something, he did it to death.</p><p>The mayor had suggested yesterday that I go mosey around the town to get to know the locals, but I still remembered a few. Granny Ev, who wasn’t anyone’s actual grandmother, as far as I knew, which I supposed made her everyone’s; her husband George, who was as bitter as a persimmon and dry as a cornhusk, but who had let me take his wheelchair out for a spin while he was laid up in his easy chair, and Aunt Marnie, who’d babysat me and let me play with the goats and climb around in the hayloft. There was also the boy I’d played with up there, whose name I’d forgotten to ask and which no one had known. I’d described him at length—bony, red hair, freckles, ballcap—when I went looking for him again, but everyone claimed there weren't any boys around that matched that description. They all thought I was talking about Marnie’s nephew Shane, who was about my age and also visiting, and um, fuck to the no, I was not. When I couldn’t find him, those same fools suggested I go play with Shane instead, as if the boy I’d liked could just be replaced, easy as that. I’d tried it to get them off my back, and had ended up punching him in the nose when he wouldn’t stop noogying me.  </p><p>There was a rickety shed standing a little ways down a dusty trail, which I vaguely remembered housing an assortment of tools and unintelligible machinery back in the day. It was mostly emptied now, with its occupants left to rust or sold off in my Grandad’s declining years, but there was still a clutch of splintery wood-handled tools and oddments. Something rustled deep in the shadowy corners. I grabbed what I needed and stepped back out again without investigating. My sneakers weren’t up to surprise snakes, or even really surprise mice.</p><p>The wooden handles of the tools were so rotted they probably would have been better used as matchsticks, but I lugged them back up the path to the house.</p><p>I stood a while with the bundle under my arm, my other hand massaging my brow. The dilapidated cottage leaned slightly to one side and groaned every time the wind gusted. There were whiplike, green little saplings growing up through the broken porch slats, and thorny weeds had completely overtaken what had probably been a small garden patch to one side. The well was dry, and the water tank that had replaced it was completely rusted over. </p><p>“Where the hell do I even start?” I asked aloud. </p><p><em>You started a long time ago</em>, a windy, chirpy little voice said.</p><p>I spun in place, tools clattering. Dust bloomed where a few slipped to the ground. The air was still. A dry, leafy rustling came from just around the corner of the house.</p><p>“Is someone there?” I called.</p><p>No one answered. </p><p>Not breathing, I steeled myself and stepped around the corner. Nothing.</p><p>An east wind picked up and tugged at my shirt sleeves—not sharply, but slowly, heavily, like a shy, insistent child.</p><p>Something made me follow. Some flash of intuition from my dreams the night before. I followed the tug through a scraggy copse of pine trees, over a tremendous desiccated tree trunk, one half of its root system fanned out in midair like a peacock’s tail, through scratchy weeds and around the sunken, muddy puddle of the half-dry pond. The tug twitched me this way or that way occasionally, making subtle course corrections, but didn’t seem to like it when I had to navigate around something. </p><p>At that thought, I stopped walking. I almost turned around and ran back to the house. The wind...didn’t like it? This was ridiculous. At best. At best ridiculous. The more real and present concern was that I was going insane. </p><p>It struck me, with a swiveling of perspective so sudden it was damn near nauseating, how crazy the last few months had been. How crazy <em>I’d </em>been. I’d known something was wrong, but it had only just sunk in <em>how</em> wrong. This place had consumed my thoughts to the point I genuinely believed I was being haunted by my obsessive but well-intentioned grandfather, and that the only choice was to alienate my girlfriend, abandon my crappy but otherwise stable job and such-as-it-was social life, and migrate out to podunk valley with nothing but a pocketful of cash and an air mattress. That belief had progressed to the point that I’d accepted it. As in: crazy no longer felt crazy. It felt normal, standard, practically common sense. More than that, it had felt like the only possible course of action.</p><p>Good god, I thought, and covered my face as I sank to my heels. I can’t do this. But that wind was back, tugging harder now, and I kept flashing on a fragmented memory: images of a bobber in a current. </p><p>I looked up. Out here at the edge of the property, the bordering tree line of the Cindersap forest was a deep and inky green, as pocked and glossy as an emu egg. Birds sang, flitting and flashing in the shadows. The soil was deep and springy with moisture. Mist clung to the air, and nearby water trilled. </p><p>I’d hardly noticed the sound of the creek. It was deeper and more confident out here. Still not a river, but there were little rushing rapids below the arched footbridge where my grandfather and I used to cast lines. A path led into the shadowed trees on the other side of the water.</p><p>I stumbled into a clear memory of my grandfather cutting bait, tacklebox laying open on the path, showing me how to dress a line. His beard was still grey, rather than white, and his shoulders were hunched but broad.</p><p><em>The bobber’s job is to go under when something tugs the hook,</em> he’d said. <em>It’s how you know something’s out there.</em></p><p>I took a deep breath and stood up. </p><p>I was already out here. I had already jumped in. And if my life was already ruined, and I was already crazy, what did it really matter if I went in a little deeper?</p><p>With a clear, cold mind, I followed that tug on my sleeve and crossed the bridge into the forest. </p><p>
  <b>***</b>
</p><p>The chill wind stopped like a door had slammed shut behind me, but the temperature dropped until the hairs on my arms were standing up. I crossed my arms and rubbed, but most of my attention stayed on the path ahead of me. What little light there was was so dusky and still that I could almost believe the forest here lived in timeless, endless twilight.</p><p>About fifty paces in, the path went abruptly from rough, packed earth to burnished cobblestones. Green shoots sprouted between the stones and shivered in a breeze I couldn’t feel; somewhere far away, a bird called a mourning song. The call tugged at my memory—but I could only remember that my grandfather had known what kind of bird made that call, and that he’d told me, and that he’d told me not to forget. I kept walking. The trees leaned close, wary and curious as a school of fish.</p><p>Finally I stepped into a clearing, but a stone wall at the back made an abrupt end to the path. I stepped in closer, til I could see chisel marks on the stone, overgrown by moss. I reached to brush at it, to scrape the years away from the surface of the stone, and saw my own name inscribed there.</p><p>When five flames—blue and iridescent—burst into being around my hand, I stumbled backward into darkness.</p><p> </p><p>***</p><p> </p><p>I woke up to the gentle piping of a flute, which wasn’t necessarily the last thing I expected to hear, but it wasn’t on the short list, either. It was muffled, outside, maybe on the porch. My eyes were dry—too dry to open on the first go. I was laying on my back in the darkened cottage with my hands crossed over my stomach, like I was laid up in a sarcophagus instead of on my still-deflated air mattress. I was fully dressed—only my shoes were missing. When I managed to creak upright, my head swam and I almost flopped back to the floor. I took a moment to prod gently at my memory.</p><p>I’d been in the woods—hadn’t I? Or had that been a dream? Had I even gotten up this morning, or had I been asleep since last night? The fluting abruptly cut out.</p><p>“It wasn’t a dream,” called a girl’s voice from the porch. “If you’ve gotten around to wondering.”</p><p>A girl with a gleaming mass of purple hair was leaning on one of the porch columns, holding a wooden flute. Her back was to me, but she hopped up and put her hands out when I stumbled over the threshold.</p><p>“Easy, man of the woods,” she said. “You’ve had a spill.”</p><p>She was maybe—what, fifteen? A kid, definitely, but I was having trouble focusing my eyes on her face.</p><p>“Who’re you?” I croaked. I wanted to spit the dust out of my mouth, but my tongue felt thick and clumsy. “What happened?”</p><p>“Abby. And a spill—you know, a spill—” she made a tumbling motion with her hands and the flute fluted a little on its own. “Sit down, now, I don’t have the muscles to pick you up if you fall again. Had to go get Linus as it was, and I don’t think he’ll come out of hiding twice in one day.”</p><p>I slumped down against a splintery column and closed my eyes. A hand patted my cheek.</p><p>“No more sleeping,” Abby said. “Here.”</p><p>When I blinked, I was looking down into a bowl of some kind of curry. The spice tickled my nose. My eyes began to water and I was finally able to focus them without effort. My mouth watered next, and my stomach churned like a sputtering engine.</p><p>“Get that down you. Dr. Harvey said you don’t have a concussion, so you’re probably weak for other reasons.”</p><p>I took the bowl and mechanically shoveled some rice into my mouth. It was good. In fact it was so good that two bites in I was breathing easier. By the end of the bowl, I was able to look around properly without my head spinning.</p><p>“Did you make this?” I asked as she took the bowl and spoon back and traded me a canteen of water that I practically poured down my throat</p><p>“Nah. That’s just leftovers from dinner with my folks last night. I can’t cook for shit.” She was wearing a strappy, be-buckled all-black get-up that seemed deeply at odds with her thick country accent. She shook her head. “Well, anything besides potions.”</p><p>“‘Kay.” I put the canteen carefully down. I wasn’t touching that comment with a ten-foot pole, concussed or not.</p><p>She snickered like I’d said something funny. “Sensible thing, aren’t you?”</p><p>“I guess. Thanks for the help.”</p><p>She tsked and patted my back. It was strange for a stranger, and such a young one, to be acting like she’d known me forever.</p><p>“You the one who’s been haunting this place, then?” she asked.</p><p>I stared at her. Maybe I was concussed after all.</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“Wandering around the grounds every night, I mean. Like a tethering, or astral projecting kind of thing, you know? I don’t get a witch-vibe from you, so been wondering how you do it.”</p><p>“I’m way too tired for this,” I said to no one in particular. Abby cocked her head, as if listening for some far off note.</p><p>“Ah.” She nodded. “Oh, you’re just uninitiated. Well, then, lemme just—”</p><p>She snapped the fingers of her left hand. A phosphorescent flare burned my eyes, and I flinched back with my hands up. When I lowered them, Abby was cupping a fist-sized ball of flame in her palm. I scrambled back until my shoulder slammed against the siding.</p><p>“What the fuck?”</p><p>She laughed, but it was almost a self-deprecating sound. “Sorry. I’m a little blunt about these kinds of things. I leave the cryptic shit to the older generation of wizards when I can, but you know they actually get kinda pissy about it? They act like I don’t have respect for tradition or something, but like, gurl, be glad I’m not trying to steal that thunder, you don’t have much left to steal, you know what I’m sayin’?”</p><p>I barely heard her. I was staring at her hand but seeing my own, surrounded by blue flames deep in the forest.</p><p>“Earlier,” I wheezed, “in the forest. Was that you—with the fire?”</p><p>“Oh no, no,” she gestured and I darted back as the heat bloomed outward from her hand. “That was werelight. Foxfire. Will-o’-the-wisp, marsh-lantern kind of thing. That’s necromancy, I’m afraid. Spirit medium shit. Waaay outside my range.” She glanced over at me. My vision was narrowing. “Take a breath, sugar.”</p><p>I hauled a slow breath in through my nose, then let it out through my mouth, then took another. Abby bounced the spiraling flame in her palm, weighing it like she was about to spike it over a volleyball net.</p><p>“Anyway, I guess that means you’ve been doing it by accident. Swoopin’ around the joint at night, hither and yon, in spirit form. You’re the grandson, right? Of the old guy who used to live here?”</p><p>I nodded. She nodded, too.</p><p>“I had a private theory that he had some of—” here she raised her not-fire-filled free hand to make air quotes, “The Blood, as it were. I barely remember him, but every time he comes up, it’s <em>Ah, Old Riley had that valley wrapped around his finger, y’know, best soil in the region, had a way with the place, even if you’d never know it from looking.</em> He wasn’t a farmer by birth, or if he was, never copped to it. He just settled here on a whim and turned this plot of land into a work of art. He had a connection. Reckon he still does.”</p><p>I swallowed with some difficulty. “Because of the—the—”</p><p>“The Shrine, yeah.” Abby nodded approvingly. “Quick study. He left this place to you, so whatever connection he has to it seems to be tethering you to it now, too. At least in layman’s terms. Again, not really my area of interest. You’d have to talk to my—” she cleared her throat, “My mentor, if you want to know more about all that.”</p><p>I didn’t know if I did.</p><p>We sat in the first awkward silence since I’d woken up until I finally gestured at the fire in her hand. “Are you—do you need a bucket of water or something to put that out?”</p><p>“<em>Put it out</em>?” Her round face contorted. “I’m not a sociopath. I’m just lettin' her firm up a bit before I settle her in the fireplace.”</p><p>I blinked. “You’re leaving it here?”</p><p>“Think of it as a housewarming gift,” she said, then tittered at what I would much, much later realize had been a pun. “You can name her if you like, but I think she might already have one.”</p><p>Abby pecked the ball of flame on what might have been a cheek and nestled it into the darkened hearth before gripping me by both shoulders—as if for a momentous occasion—and similarly kissing me on both cheeks, which I very much was not ready for. “May you never need matches,” she pronounced, and before I could say anything back, she was trotting back up the hill toward the main road to the village.</p><p>I went back in, reinflated my air mattress, and stared at the fire crackling away in the hearth. I fed her a log from the woodpile, fed myself some of the curry Abby had left, until finally, head as full as my belly, I slept.</p><p>***</p><p>My dreams were lit with blue. Grandad was there, as I’d expected. A lucid dream this time.</p><p>“You woke the Shrine!” Grandad said, palms up and arms spread, smile shining like he was welcoming me back after a long time away. Which I supposed he was. “Boy, that <em>does</em> make this easier.”</p><p>The surge of emotion was as crushing as it was indistinct. I didn’t know if I was angry, thrilled, or devastated to see him—I didn’t know if I really <em>was</em> seeing him, and whether <em>that</em> made me angry or relieved or confused or sad. I did know I was going to cry when I woke up, but for the moment, I just threw my arms around him like I had as a kid.</p><p>“There now,” he said, and patted my head. Either he was huge or I was dime-sized again. He dislodged me gently and walked me back as if to get a look at me. His eyes were indistinct in a way that crossed my own even in the dream. “Gotta make this quick—was starting to think that old witch must notta done what I paid her for as it was, so no telling how long we’ve got. Luckily it’s not a complicated message.”</p><p>The whole valley—that is, the valley as it must have been decades or even hundreds of years ago—resolved around us. The orchard, the vineyard, barns and gardens and ponds and rolling grassy hills cut through with creek and stream, in too much detail to process. I had never seen it like this, even as a kid, when everything is bigger and brighter: a vibrant, pulsing hive of life and energy, full of bees and ants and earthworms that I couldn’t see but knew were there.</p><p>“This place needs looking after,” Grandad said. “I know you said this life wasn’t for you, but—I hope you can forgive me for dragging you back. I just didn’t know myself how important it was until the very end.”</p><p>I nodded. I still didn’t forgive him, quite—not for haunting me into uprooting my life, not for never telling me magic was real and not for scaring the shit out of me with that fire in the woods, not for dying in the first place—but I wasn’t about to scold my momentarily undead grandfather in the last moments I might ever have with him. Moments I’d never expected to get in the first place.</p><p>“We’re guardians, Ward. It sounds strange even to me to say it like that, but turns out it’s the truth. Of what, I’m honestly not sure, but it's here in this valley. There, that sounds even more foolish, but guardians aren’t historians or mages. We’re keepers, minders.” He looked around at the scene, eyes brimming, and I realized I was looking at the land as he saw it. It might never have been this idyllic, but this was how it had appeared to him, or all the potential he saw in it. This is what he had thought he was offering me when he willed me the farm, and I had turned it down. “We don’t need to know—or at least I didn’t. There’s someone out there who might know, or find out, but I never needed it to be me. Not when I got to live so close to the thing itself.”</p><p>“How’m I supposed to know how to keep it, though?” I finally managed. My voice was young, too—so high it sounded almost like a girl’s.</p><p>“If you stay, it’ll come to you,” he said. “You know more than you think already. Sometimes when you’re built for a thing, it just—” he shrugged. “Plus, there’s the enchantment I wrangled out of that witch. What’s making this dream possible. The land will teach you a lot, but this,” he twirled a finger around at his brain-space, then tapped his temple, “will give you a mainline to what I learned in my time here, too. But it won’t come with a filing cabinet labelled ‘Stuff Grandpa Knew,’ mind. Gonna have to just keep your eyes open and trust your instincts, which is harder than it sounds.”</p><p>Just at that moment, though, I wasn’t worried about the land, or even how to know what to do next. All I wanted was to go back to that bridge by the edge of the forest, cast a line, and listen to Grandad talk about the Legend one more time.</p><p>“No time for a fishing trip, I’m afraid,” Grandad said, and put his hand on my head again. “We’ll see each other again sometime, maybe not this clearly, but better leave the Shrine for emergencies. The cost gets pretty steep.” He smiled and tapped the side of his nose. “But then, you probably knew that already.”</p><p>***</p><p>Light was just painting the horizon when I opened my eyes. Stars still speckled the sky. It was strange to know they’d still be there, each one as bright as our sun but no less invisible in the daytime. That same bird called again in the far off distance, the one whose name I’d forgotten and hadn’t thought to ask in the dream.</p><p>I pressed my face into my pillow and did what I hadn’t managed to do at Grandad’s funeral, or even after, and cried. I still couldn’t manage much, but I found I didn’t have as many tears stored up as I might have thought. After a little while—not long—I sat up and looked out the window over the table.</p><p><em>Better get rolling</em>, something told me. Maybe the fire still crackling in the hearth. Maybe the last trace of the dream. I took a deep breath and started the day.</p><p> </p>
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<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Adventurers</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Penn POV</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Mom?”</p><p>I swept the flashlight beam across the floor and walls of the dark cavern before I called again. The answering silence was broken only by the drip of water somewhere around the bend to the rendezvous site. We’d gotten split up a few turns ago thanks to a crappy halter snapping, and with my hands full of both our packs and a bulky flashlight, I wasn’t feeling as confident on my own as I’d’ve liked.</p><p>“Mom, for real, come on.”</p><p>Something slop-slorped in the shadows behind me. I didn’t turn around. I knew it was there, and as long as I kept moving and didn’t look at it, it might not mood-swing into aggression. I took another step. It slorped again, faster this time.</p><p>“Shit,” I whispered. Sweat was beading up on my brow. The air was still and humid down here, and my labored breaths echoed against the slick, glinting walls. My left arm chose that moment to cramp, and I fumbled, over-corrected, and the flashlight beam swung in a wide, blazing arc. An outraged hiss sounded almost at my heels, and I leapt to one side just as venomous teeth snapped where my legs had been an instant before.</p><p>“Fucken—<em>MOM</em>!”</p><p>There was a snap and a twang and a muted, sludgy impact, then the creature exploded into mud and river guts. I took a deep breath to steady myself, then looked down.</p><p>“Gross,” I murmured. I shook the slime off one leg and almost lost my balance again.</p><p>“It’s just animated earth, hun,” Mom’s husky voice rasped.</p><p>“Yes, I’m aware,” I said, jamming my mud-splattered glasses back into place on the bridge of my nose. “And I would <em>just</em> like to stop being <em>opportunistically</em> and <em>nonconsensually</em> used as bait.”</p><p>“Can’t shoot straight, gotta be bait,” quoth my mother.</p><p>I groaned. My mom’s take on tactical survival gave a whole new meaning to the term queer-baiting. My aim was probably the straightest thing about me.</p><p>Mom stepped into the beam and winked at me. Her eyes and teeth flashed in the light, but her curly hair was lank and smeared with mud. She knelt and fished around in the creature’s soupy remains until she found what she was looking for: her crossbow bolt, and a lumpy copper token inscribed with a single, primitive rune.</p><p>She nudged it around in the muddied palm of her hand, letting it catch the light. “Always get one for the road,” she said with a grin.</p><p>Despite my irritation, my fingers itched to hold the piece, to whip out a magnifying glass and calipers and start jotting down measurements right there in the dim light, but I only marked the find on our map of the caves, then the artifact disappeared into a pouch on mom’s belt.</p><p>She nodded. “Alright. You ready to ditch this place?”</p><p>“God, yes—“</p><p>I broke off and squinted in the low light. Her right arm was bloody above the elbow. I nodded at it.</p><p>“Yours, or?”</p><p>“Oh, uh—” she followed my nod and holstered her one-hand crossbow. She prodded gingerly at her shoulder. “Ah, yeah, I guess that is mine. Must have been the fall.”</p><p>“Dammit, Mom.” I yanked the canteen out of my pack and twisted off the cap. “This is why we need better equipment.”</p><p>“Well, then you can just slink on into the guild house when we get there and tell that to Marlon and Gil. They’re the ones who handle requisitions.” She winced as I poured water over the wound, clearing the mud and filth away from it as best I could. She was so much bigger than me.</p><p>“Mhm, sure, and you can just keep limping on into doctors’ offices to pay them ten times what you would have put down for a sturdier halter at a civilian outdoors shop.”</p><p>Mom took a breath like she had a comeback, but thought better of it. “Fine.” She shook her head and grimaced. “Point.”</p><p>“Damn right, it’s a point,” I muttered. She leaned in and smooched my temple.</p><p>“Come on, grumps,” she said. “Let’s get topside. Long way to go still.”</p><p>
  <b>***</b>
</p><p>The old Windstream trailer rattled along the highway as Mom and I made our way to the coast. Pelican Town was next on the list, and, as the name would suggest, right on the water. We’d been there before, when I was still what mom called a “wee bab,” but really I was about ten. I hadn’t seen the Gem Sea in a long while, but I remembered it clearly enough.</p><p>Emerald dawns, sapphire days, ruby and rose quartz sunsets, then star obsidian all through the night. And when it stormed, every wave seemed cut from a matrix of black diamond: they were all flinty angles and ragged foamy crests. I had liked the storms, even as a kid. Even when it rocked in the wind, our warm little trailer had felt as tranquiline as an egg tucked under a downy momma hen.</p><p>We hadn’t been back since the guild’s last all-hands meeting fifteen years before. Once car phones became a thing and orders could be delivered wirelessly, there wasn’t much need for us to appear in person anymore. There had been no official word on why this in-person summons had been issued, though, and Mom and I had carefully resisted the urge to speculate. Or maybe I was the one resisting the urge—Mom wasn’t really the ruminating type.</p><p>I put my feet up on the dash and thumbed through the old copy of “Marcie and the Underground Castle” that had been sitting neglected on my knees for the past two hours. Just inside the cover, in the space beside “From the Library of”, I’d scrawled and scratched out and re-scrawled my name over and over. Stacked up like they were, they made their own little archaeological timeline of my life, like layers in a core sample: at the bottom was my fullest, earliest name, given to me by my parents. The first thing I’d learned to write, almost before I had really grasped the notion that everyone (including my parents) had one, and this one was mine, but that no matter how firmly it was stuck to me I’d never really own it. That it was more than just “you come here”—it actually formed the shape of how other people thought of me. Probably about five years old. Then another, circa seven years old, this time using my nickname instead. Then there followed three or four entries trying out luridly loopy cursive in varying styles with various full or shortened forms of my name, trying out adding my middle name, and then slightly more conservative cursive using just my first and middle initials with my last name. And finally, in the rambling chicken-scratch I’d developed as an adult, the version of my name I’d eventually settled on for good and all: <em>Penn Ostler</em>.</p><p>Mom and I never talked much on these long drives, and I still can’t really read in the truck without getting motion sick, which I’ll probably never stop bitching about. We listened to the radio, the range of any local station passing within an hour or two, or to books on tape, the same six or seven classic novels over and over again, and shouted or sang or chipmunk-voiced the best parts along with the narrator. It was mostly Mom driving, partly because the old truck’s finicky gearbox liked her best, and also because every time I took the wheel, I put on a lecture series on cave geology I’d taped when we were commissioned by the dean of ZU to discreetly take care of a minor outbreak of slimes on campus. Slimes draw most of their power from the sea, so that far from the coast, they hadn’t been much of a challenge, but Mom played it up for a few days to give me time to sit in on some lectures and poke around the campus library. She’d been regretting it ever since.</p><p>“That shit,” she’d recently bellowed as I fished around in the battered console for the first tape, “bores me to genuwine tears.”</p><p>“Then weep,” I’d said. I learned something new every time I listened back through them, and that knowledge had kept us alive more than once. And besides—I fed the tape into the deck delicately, with just the very tip of my index finger, like I was pushing a cracker into a snappish parrot’s beak. “Driver picks.”</p><p>“Cry myself to sleep, at least,” Mom muttered, tucking her head into her shoulder and leaning against the passenger window.</p><p>
  <b>***</b>
</p><p>Pelican Town was situated windward, at the base of a sizable mountain, skirted by miles of sandy beach and coral reef. A rich environment on land and in sea, apparently. In my dad’s old notes, I’d found a few comments about how the richness of the area’s bottomland and the precious mineral resources of the mountain, coupled with the obliging trade winds and sea channels made it a likely habitation and port for the ancient elvish and dwarven races, but no particulars were listed. Depending on how long Marlon and Gil were planning to keep us for this meeting, I decided, I might head off on a survey of my own, see if I could get a relic or two out of the trip. Something to show for myself come fall.</p><p>I hadn’t brought it up to Mom yet, but I’d decided after the call came in from Marlon that this would be our last job as a duo. Confession time, I guess: I’ve been sitting on an acceptance letter from ZU’s masters program for weeks now. Applied in secret, accepted in secret, guiltily put off spilling the beans to Mom in secret. All for no better reason than I could never think of a good time to bring it up. This work is Mom’s whole life, you know? And it’s been mine too for a while now, and exploding subterranean slime creatures notwithstanding, I don’t hate it—but I do want more. I want to know more. More than hasty library trips and trial-and-error caving and more than the same damn lecture series listened to on repeat through busted tin-can speakers can offer me.</p><p>I’ll be older than most of the other research fellows by several years, but honestly I figure that’ll be a relief. I am—predictably, perhaps—not an especially social creature by nature. People see the tattoos and the piercings and assume I’m some kind of party animal, but my principle pastimes involve huge quantities of tea and coffee and books and, on the rare occasion I can manage it, solitude. All I think about are the mysteries that live underground, out of sight, waiting to be rediscovered, waiting to be rescued from the archaeological record. If I have any say in the matter, I want at least a few of those things to be rescued by me.</p><p>We pulled into Pelican Town late but also early, around eleven on the night before we were due to arrive. Mom tried to play it cool, but I could guess she was headed straight to whichever watering hole was open in the tiny town. Sure enough, as soon as we parked at the campground, Mom antsily checked her hair in the rearview, then belatedly, her grubby nails. She grimaced as she whipped out a pocketknife and began to pare them.</p><p>“I’m gonna walk into town,” she said. “See if the Stardrop still has that valley pale ale I like on tap. You comin’?”</p><p>I shook my head and waved her on before she could insist. I could tell she had someone she wanted to see, and anyway, I needed to clear my head, too. The looming dread of “one last job” had really come home to roost in the past few hours of the drive, and the pressure was building. I had no doubt if I got so much as a sip of alcohol down me, I’d end up blabbing my plans at the worst possible moment, and knowing me, in the most awkward possible way.</p><p>Mom tossed me the keys and set off down the road at an eager clip. The isolation of our lifestyle was harder on her than on me, even if she never talked about it. As comfortable as she might be in the grime and murk below ground, she was really only happy in a crowded bar or lively hostel lounge, one arm around an affable stranger as she wrung their life story out of them between gulps of something bitter and bubbly.</p><p>I flopped down at the desk in my cramped little room and let the pouch Mom had filled with copper relics from the last hunt spill across the blotter. These made for easy, mindless work: sketching the runes scratched into each, cross-referencing each maker’s mark against our catalog of known witches and wizards. The Adventurer’s Guild liked to track who’d been up to what mischief and in what regions so they could avoid sending their people directly into harm’s way, at least.</p><p>We rarely went down deep enough to find the really old golems, the ones with hearts of iron or gold. Those were the ones that outlived their makers—or sometimes destroyed their makers—and took a lot more than a bolt or two to bring down. Admittedly, Mom had done more than a little trophy-hunting in the early days when the anger over my dad’s death was still fresh and hot, but these days we steered clear and kept the surface pests at bay. When the makers lost control of the big ones, as they often did, the monsters tended to flee down, not up. What was the point of hunting them, I’d shouted in our last major blow up after Dad’s death, if they were that deep in the earth? Past a certain point, they were just part of the ecosystem. It took me threatening to quit the guild outright if she didn’t stop taking unnecessary risks, but I eventually brought Mom around to my side. I could tell she still got restless with the small fry, though.</p><p>I was about to telegraph my findings for the last mine trip—same witch, same approximate level of activity as the average listed for the area in the codex—when it occurred to me that we were already in town. I may as well walk the figures for the risk assessment over to the guild HQ. They probably had a nightbox, or if old Gil was the same insomniac he’d been fifteen years ago, maybe they never closed, for that matter. I tucked my journal into my pocket and struck out into the cool night air.</p><p>The heart of Cindersap forest was technically off a ways to the southwest, in the valley, but you’d never know it heading up the mountain. The sappy green scent of pine prickled my nose. Ancient trees creaked in the wind and crowded the path like they had somewhere to be. The sandy ground was covered in a surprisingly slippery blanket of rust-red pine needles and acorns from last season that rolled underfoot. I suddenly remembered my dad bringing me up this way on our last visit to HQ. He’d pointed off an overlook to the east, to the ragged gray scrim of land on the farthest horizon. When I’d said I’d sail there some day, he laughed. “You don’t need a boat to visit the Gotoro Empire, kiddo,” he’d told me. “Just a clear day and a good hard squint.” The war had started a few years later, just a few months after the attack that killed him, and I stopped wanting to visit—or even squint hard enough to see—the Gotoro Empire.</p><p>A light blazed between the trees around the bend in the path ahead, and within a few steps the guild headquarters hove into view. The same sturdy but ramshackle old joint situated in the lee of a sizable rocky crag, only slightly worse for wear than I remembered it being fifteen years before. Sure enough, the lights were still on inside, and when I touched my ring to the guild crest on the door, the door swung open.</p>
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